Because state licensing and requirements differ and compliance is difficult, no two circumstances are alike. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Our experts are local to California and understand the BPPE. We offer advice and solutions that are tailored to the needs of our clients. Private postsecondary vocational schools, non-degree-granting institutions, and degree-granting institutions all require a license, approval, or exemption from a state agency. We assist our clients in putting together complex and tough applications, as well as applying for and receiving approval for their schools or programs. If your dream is to own a certificate-only or degree granting school, we have affordable options. We may even be able to get your school open in California in as little as 30 days!
If you are looking to buy an already established college or university, we have helped broker purchases, too. We have a strong postsecondary education background, which has given us an advantage as industry experts. We speak the regulators’ language and can provide realistic solutions that help our clients to open a new school (including online universities, vocational schools, and ESL schools), expand current school operations, find overseas partners, comply with education standards, or simply become more responsible institutions. In addition, we can assist with compliance issues that may arise with the BPPE.
As BPPE consultants, we help our clients reach the best possible situation in their time of need. The law school is named in honor of the Gould family. Judge James Gould was a noted legal scholar and one of the teachers and proprietors of Litchfield Law School, the first law school in the United States. His descendant Charles Winthrop Gould, a distinguished New York lawyer, bequeathed the family estate to his nephew, Col. John W. Barnes, who earned his LLB in 1927 and his LLM in 1929, both at USC. When Barnes died in the mid-1940s, he left the Gould estate in trust to the university. The full gift came in the mid-1960s, when USC Law became USC Gould School of Law.
In 1929, we established the Legal Clinic at USC, in which students gained hands-on training in the delivery of legal services to the poor. It served as a model for other law schools across the country in both experiential learning and public interest programs. By the time the clinic became the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles in 1937, USC Gould students and faculty had assisted more than 19,000 clients representing dozens of countries. Thirty years later, in 1967, USC Gould housed what would become California’s oldest and largest legal services support center — the Western Center on Law and Poverty. In 1965, with the groundbreaking course Law, Language and Ethics, USC Gould became the first to incorporate an interdisciplinary curriculum into legal studies.
The school would soon add concepts from psychology, politics, medicine, economics, history and other fields. This launched a new, nationwide paradigm regarding how lawyers are trained. In other educational innovations, USC Gould was the second top 20 law school to introduce an online LLM degree and the first to offer a graduate certificate in business law. In subsequent years, equality of opportunity was extended to apply to faculty and staff as well as to students, and to cover more than race. Today, AALS requires all member schools “to provide equality of opportunity in legal education for all persons, including faculty and employees, applicants for admission, enrolled students, and graduates, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender (including identity and expression), sexual orientation, age, or disability.”
In 1966, the first person of color was elected to the Executive Committee. Clarence Clyde Ferguson, Jr., who had been barred from higher education in his home state of Maryland because of his race, graduated cum laude from Ohio State in 1948 and Harvard Law School in 1951. He had served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946 where he took part in the Normandy invasion. When elected to the Executive Committee, Ferguson was Dean of Howard Law School. The North American Consortium on Legal Education (NACLE), comprised of 12 participating law schools in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, seeks to promote and share an understanding of the legal systems within North American countries as well as enhance the capabilities of each member.
To provide high quality legal education and research appropriate to the demands of the professional environment in North America. NACLE was created in 1998 with grant support from Canada, Mexico, and the United States’ governments. NACLE’s membership has expanded from the original nine members to twelve law schools and legal institutes in Canada, Mexico and the United States, including the University of Houston Law Center. The late Stephen Zamora, founding director of the Center for U.S. and Mexican Law, served as Administrative Director of NACLE for many years. The City Law School has a history of delivering legal education which dates back to the nineteenth century in the form of the Inns of Court School of Law (ICSL).
The ICSL was prominent as the original and sole provider of bar training in the United Kingdom. The other chapter of our history can be found at our present home in Northampton Square. City, University of London established the Centre for Legal Studies in 1977 when it commenced delivery of the forerunner to the current Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) programme. In fact, we were the first to develop the concept of the ‘conversion course’. Other programmes followed, most notably the undergraduate Bachelor of Laws degree – now the Law LLB (Hons) – which began in 1990. In 2001, the ICSL joined City, University of London and with the Centre for Legal Studies, they formed The City Law School.
We started the development of a comprehensive range of academic and professional programmes to make us the full-service provider of legal education we are today. A 10-member Executive Committee leads the Association. It includes the President, Immediate Past President and President-Elect, six other elected members and, ex officio, the Executive Director. For its first 62 years, the Association relied entirely on the elected officers and volunteer faculty to carry out its work, including arrangements for the Annual Meeting and publication of the AALS Directory of Law Teachers. In 1963 the Association established a national office in Washington, D.C. and hired Michael H. Cardozo as its first Executive Director.
By the end of his term in 1972, AALS established Sections, which enabled faculty and staff for the first time to connect with their peers in different fields of law of their own choosing, and the House of Representatives to ensure member schools had a voice in the major affairs of the AALS. When Cardozo was appointed, little was said about his role. Studying law in the United States is very different from studying law in many other countries. In various countries, students begin their law studies immediately following graduation from high school or secondary school. Most universities in other countries require only a high school diploma or the equivalent to admit students to their law faculties. In the US, however, law is a professional academic field, the equivalent of a graduate degree in other parts of the world.
Law schools in the US are part of public or private universities that grant Juris Doctor (J.D.) degrees. The J.D. program typically lasts three years for full-time students and four years for part-time students. The first year of law school is generally considered to be the most difficult because of the core classes, exams, and the Socrates method. Note: The Socrates method is a technique used in most law school classes in which the professor cold calls on students to state a case or respond to a case-based question. This intimidates many students, particularly international students who might be afraid to speak up in class, but most adapt to the teaching style quickly. As a third-year student (3L), you will likely take electives such as international law, immigration law, anti-trust law, or intellectual Property Law.
Third-year students generally focus most of their time on finding employment and studying for the bar exam. Note: The bar exam is a test meant to determine whether a candidate is qualified to practice law in their jurisdiction. If you decide to practice law in a different country or state you might be required to take a second bar exam to become a dual-qualified lawyer. Legal history enriches our understanding of the law, enhancing our grasp of current problems and empowering us to imagine new alternatives. Scholars examine how legal ideas, doctrines, and institutions change over time, exploring how they shape and are shaped by social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Legal historians are guided by figures like judges and legislators as well as ordinary people, who give voice to their own ideas of what the law is and should be. Legal history occupies a central place in the intellectual life of the Law School.
All students benefit from the Law School’s rich and varied curriculum in legal history, whether they are seeking to round out their education or pursuing more in-depth interdisciplinary investigation. In recent years, the Law School’s commitment to build on its tradition of excellence in legal history has yielded one of the most promising and distinguished legal history faculties in the country.Of particular note, CUSLI has hosted numerous prestigious academics, public servants, and private practitioners at its various conferences and events. For example , the institute’s 1979 conference hosted Canadian Supreme Court Justice Brian Dickson and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart – the first time justices of the respective courts had ever participated in such a program. Other distinguished guests have included United States and Canadian ambassadors, trade representatives, congressional representatives and ministers of Parliament. Diversity came slowly to AALS.
In 1950, the membership resolved that the AALS should abolish “segregation or discrimination in legal education on racial grounds” and take appropriate enforcement action. In 1951, the membership adopted a resolution that embraced “equality of opportunity in legal education without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race or color.” There was no enforcement of the resolution until 1958 when the University of Richmond T.C. Williams School of Law was censured after it self-reported that it was denying students admission based on race. In 1965, when the University of Richmond announced that it would no longer discriminate on the basis of race in student admissions, the censure was removed. The first woman elected to the Executive Committee was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, later a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
She was a faculty member at Rutgers when she served in 1972. Many other firsts have followed including Leo Romero (New Mexico) the first Hispanic on the Executive Committee in 1981; Gerald Torres (Texas), the first Hispanic President in 2004; Rennard Strickland (Oregon), a legal historian of Osage and Cherokee heritage who served as the first Native American President in 1994; and Wallace D. Loh (University of Washington), the first Asian-American to serve on the Executive Committee in 1972, and as President of AALS in 1976. While provincial law societies are not directly involved in law school curriculums, they are tasked with making sure applicants for admission to the bar have the knowledge, skills, and ability to perform the tasks essential for the competent practise of law.
Law societies lack the information they ought to have and do not engage in informed speculation about where events are taking the profession, says Arthurs.Despite these Amendments, African Americans were often treated differently than whites in many parts of the country, especially in the South. In fact, many state legislatures enacted laws that led to the legally mandated segregation of the races. In other words, the laws of many states decreed that blacks and whites could not use the same public facilities, ride the same buses, attend the same schools, etc. These laws came to be known as Jim Crow laws. Although many people felt that these laws were unjust, it was not until the 1890s that they were directly challenged in court.
In 1892, an African-American man named Homer Plessy refused to give up his seat to a white man on a train in New Orleans, as he was required to do by Louisiana state law. For this action he was arrested. Plessy, contending that the Louisiana law separating blacks from whites on trains violated the “equal protection clause.
The North American Consortium on Legal Education (NACLE) is comprised of 13 participating law schools in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. It was created in 1998 through grants provided by the participating countries. NACLE sets out to promote and share understanding of the legal systems within North American countries. Enhancing the capability of each member to provide a high quality legal education to students is a central objective of the organization. The professional legal environment in North America is continuously evolving and students must be prepared to meet its demands. Strengthening research, writing, and advocacy skills is at the core of NACLE’s curriculum.
NACLE provides a unique forum for scholars and practitioners to collaborate with member governments to come up with answers to contemporary legal questions concerning North America. Students participate in NACLE mostly through semester-long exchanges and academic competitions that prompt the necessary dialogue that fosters innovative ideas and solutions. More broadly, NACLE hosts annual conferences and panels to bring together the private and public sectors with the legal minds that make up the organization.
